Loon Lake

  No, because the poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.

  Your register apologizes for rendering nonlinear thinking in linear language, the apperceptions of oneness in dualistic terminology. However, there is no difficulty representing the absolute physical torture of Warren Penfield’s commitment to Zen meditation. He could not physically accomplish even the half lotus, his spine threatened to snap, his legs seemed to be in a vise; even the mudra—the bowl-shaped position of the hands, the thumbs lightly touching, a simple relaxed representation in the hand of the flow from right to left, from left to right, the rocking crescent continuity of the universe intimations of stars and ancient Eastern recognitions—became under the torment of his distracted physically weeping thought a spastic hand clench, a hardened manifestation of frozen fear and anguish, the exact opposite of the right practice, the body imprisoned, the mind entirely personal and self-involved and then God help you if you nod off every now and then as who could not, sitting like a damn beer pretzel twelve, sixteen hours a day he comes along and hits you with the damn slapstick the goddamn yellow-skinned bastard the next time he hits me with that stick I’m going to get up and wrap it around his goddamn yellow neck and break a goddamn Buddha doll over his goddamn shaven head this is not right thinking but tell me Gautama enlighten me if what you say is true why is it so difficult to attain wouldn’t it all make a lot more sense if everyone could do it if everyone could be it without even thinking without being anything less before, without the death of my darling, and men drowning in the cold black coalwater of collapsed mines miles of coalstone sinking slowly upon their chests, or bullets perforating them like cutout coupons supposing I do attain it, supposing I find the right understanding what then what happens outside me how do I help Local 10110 of the Western Federation of Miners, Smelters, Sheepdippers and Zenpissers, and then there’s the food, look what we wait for when at last the cute little tinkly bell rings and we may unpretzel ourself and try to regain the circulation in our swollen limbs, little bits of pickled leather, or some absolute excresence of the lowest sea life lightly salted or a congealed ball of rice dipped in some rank fermented fluid that smells to me like the stuff we dipped the pigeons in to kill the lice.

  No, there is no problem expressing the inner record of Warren Penfield’s quest for enlightenment: the whining despair, the uncharacteristic epithet, the rage, the backsliding giving up and consequent self-nauseation, the stubborn goings on, all of this silent, in a temple hall of inscrutable meditators, all of whom reminded him of the immigrant kids in the Ludlow Grade School around him totally serene and insulated in their lack of language the feeling what do they all know that I don’t know why don’t the storms of self taste fire and thunder across their brainbrow, why aren’t they as sick and unsure of their dangerous selves as I am of mine, leading then to the false Zen-like casuistry as, for example, if we are to press ourselves on the world sticking to it like a decal, if I am one with the rocks the trees the stars why is my memory invalid and why then are the images of Clara on our beds of slag in the cool mountain dusk of Colorado forbidden me, I am my memory and the images of my past are me, and if I am the rocks and stones and trees, Wordsworth, rocked round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees, why are my phantoms less real why are the ghostvoices of my mama and papa less real why is the mud of the Marne less real why must I exclude exclude, if everything is now and mind is matter is not everything valid is not meditation the substance of the mind as well as its practice?

  Nor is it difficult to render the casually developed outer circumstances of this monastic life, the old Master becoming at some times demonic in his teaching, a destroyer of ego, of humble ordinary lines of thought, an army of right practice, right understanding overwhelming the frail redoubts and trenches of Warren’s Western mind. One day they were in the temple and he came in screaming, naked, climbed the Buddha like a bee alighting on a flower and bending it with its own honeygravid weight and they watched shocked and stunned as a beautiful polished wood Buddha toppled to the floor under the Master, an act of profound desecration with sexual impact, and the Buddha lay split like a log, a piece of wood the aperture of an earthquake and nothing was ever said of it again. He was a violent old man, one day Warren was admitted for his counseling and the Master threw a cup of cold green tea in his face and that was the lesson of the day. One day he lectured them all, a particular holy day and he shouted at them saying you were all Masters when you first came through the gate and now look at you, I have more respect for the horse that pulls the shitwagon than I have for you—screaming and growling and trilling in the Japanese way of singsong, Warren prostrate with all the rest. But everyone took it as material to be pondered and worked out, it was only a style of pedagogy and only someone stupid enough to take emotions seriously would be shocked threatened or angered by the serene antics of the realized Buddha spirit of such a great Master. Warren finally reached the preliminary kindergarten stage of getting his own koan, a paradoxical question to form the empty mind of meditation. Each devotee received his own koan like a rabbit’s foot to stroke and treasure, an unanswerable question to torment him month after month, perhaps year after year, until enlightenment burst over and he was able to answer it when the Master gently asked it of him the hundred millionth time. Warren walked in bowed, kneeled on the straw mat. The Master was smoking and making each breath visible as a plume of cigarette smoke and Warren knew the standard koans, the famous ones, there were actually collections of them like college course outlines but the one given to him he had never heard before or read anywhere and it was delivered by the Master with a shake of his head, a sigh and a glance of helpless supplication at the ceiling: Penfield-san, said the Master, if this is a religion for warriors, what are you doing here? Warren thanked him, bowed and backed out of the room even though the Master looked as if he was going to say something more. Later in his first pondering of this infinitely resounding question he squatted by his favorite place, near the garden gate beyond the gravel garden, and saw through the slats as for the first time the beautiful little girl who swept the street.

  I drove out of the mountains through the night and found the way to Utica, New York, coming into city streets in the rain at three o’clock, passing freight yards, warehouses. She was asleep, I didn’t want to wake her, I bumped the car gently across the railroad tracks and headed south and west toward Pittsburgh.

  I wanted to log as many miles as I could before Bennett got up in the morning.

  By dawn I was clear-eyed exhausted, feeling my nerves finely strung, the weariness in the hinges of my jaws, you are never more alert. Red lights in the dawn at intersections between fields, I saw the light of dawn shoot clear down the telegraph wires like a surge of power, I passed milk trucks and heard train whistles the sun came up and flooded my left eye suddenly it was day commerce was on the roads we had survived Loon Lake and were cruising through the United States of America.

  I woke her for breakfast, we walked into a diner—some town in Pennsylvania. Clara in her fur jacket and long dress and Junior in his knickers and sweater. Someone dropped a plate. Clara is not awake yet—a hard sleeper, a hard everything—she sits warming her hands on her coffee cup, studies the tabletop.

  “This won’t do,” I said, steering her by the arm to the car.

  “What?”

  “It’s asking for trouble.”

  I found an Army-Navy Surplus Store. I bought myself a regular pair of pants, work shirt, socks, a wool seaman’s cap and khaki greatcoat. I bought Clara a black merchant marine pullover and a pea jacket. I made her change her clothes in the back of the store. Then I did.

  Mr. Penfield had pressed upon me about eighty dollars in clean soft ones and fives, bills that looked as if they had spent years in a shoe box. I added to this the forty dollars or so of my own fortune. The clothes had come to twenty-eight, and another dollar and change for breakfast.

/>   “What kind of money do you have?”

  “Money?”

  “I want to see what our cash assets are.”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “That’s really swell.”

  “Look in my bag if you don’t believe me.”

  “Well, how far did you think you could go without money?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  It was the best of conversations, all I could have wished for. I scowled. I drove hard.

  We took the bumps in unison, we leaned at the same angle on the curves. I didn’t know where we were going and she didn’t ask. I drove to speed. I stopped wondering what she was feeling, what she was thinking. She was happy on the move, alert and at peace, all the inflamed spirit was lifted from her. She had various ways of arranging herself in the seat, legs tucked up or one under the other, or arms folded, head down, but in any position definitive, beautiful.

  Come with me

  Late that afternoon we were going up a steep hill along the Monongahela, Pittsburgh spreading out below us, stacks of smoke, black sky, crucible fire. By nightfall I was numb, I couldn’t drive another mile. We were in some town in eastern Ohio, maybe it was Steubenville, I’m not sure. On a narrow street I found the Rutherford Hayes, a four-story hotel with fire escapes and a barber’s pole at the entrance. I took a deep breath and pulled up to the curb.

  In the empty lobby were the worn upholstered chairs and half-dead rubber plants that would have been elegance had I not been educated at Loon Lake. I had never stayed at a hotel but I knew what to do from the movies.

  I got us upstairs without incident and tipped the bellboy fifty cents. “Yes, suh!” he said. I chain-locked the door behind him.

  We had a corner room with large windows, each covered with a dark green pull shade and flimsy white curtains. Everything had a worn-out look, a great circle of wear in the middle of the rug. I liked that. I liked the idea of public accommodation, people passing through. Bennett could keep his Loon Lake. I looked out the window. We were on the top floor, we had a view of greater Steubenville. In the bathroom was a faucet for ice water.

  Clara, who had been in hotels before, found the experience unexceptional. She opened her overnight bag and took over the bathroom. I smoked a cigarette and listened to the sounds of her bathing. I kept looking around the room as if I expected to see someone else. Who? We were alone, she was alone with me and nobody knew where we were. I was smiling. I was thinking of myself crouched in the weeds in the cold night while a train goes by and a naked girl holds a white dress before a mirror.

  This was a double bed I had booked and she hadn’t even blinked. That would seem reason to hope. But for Clara Lukaćs there was no necessary significance in sleeping beside somebody in the same bed. She came out of the bathroom without a stitch. I undressed and turned out the light as cool in my assumptions as I could be. A high whine of impatience, a kind of child’s growl, and a poke of her elbow was what I got when I happened to move against her in the dark. Just testing.

  She curled up with her back toward me, and those vertebrae which I had noticed and loved were all at once deployed like the Maginot Line.

  ——

  In the morning she woke out of sorts, mean.

  “What in hell am I doing here?” she muttered. “Jesus,” she said, looking at me. “I must be out of my mind.”

  I was stunned. My first impulse was to appeal.

  “Look at him, hunky king of the road there. Oh, this is great—this really is great.” She snapped up the window shade and looked out. “God damn him,” she said. “And his wives and his boats and choo-choo trains.”

  She began to dress. She held up blouses, skirts, looked at them, flung them down. She sat abruptly on the bed with her arms full of clothes and she stared at the floor.

  “Hey,” I said. “I told you I’d get you out of there and I did. Didn’t I?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Hey, girlie,” I said, “didn’t I? You have a complaint? You think you’re some hot-ass bargain?”

  “You bet I am, hunky, I can promise you.”

  “Well then, go on,” I said. “Go back to your fancy friends and see what they do for you. Look what they already done.”

  I got out of bed, pulled on my pants and socks, and stuck my feet in my shoes.

  “Where are you going?” she said.

  “Here,” I said, taking out my wallet. I crumpled a couple of singles and threw them on the floor. “That and a twitch of your ass will get you back to the loons.”

  “You’re not leaving,” she said. “You’re not leaving me here!”

  “You can go back to your career fucking for old men,” I said. I put on my shirt and combed my hair in the mirror over the dresser. “It’s probably as good as you can do anyhow.”

  The mirror shattered. I didn’t know what she had thrown. When I went for her she was reaching for the Gideon Bible to throw that. I grabbed her arm and we knocked the bedside lamp to the floor. I pinned her to the bed. She tried to bite me. I held her by the wrists and put my knees on each point of the pelvis.

  “You’re hurting me!” I moved back and let go of her. She lay still. A queer bitter smell came from her. It was anger that aroused her, confrontation was the secret.

  But when I found her she was loving and soft and she shrank away softer and more innocent of her feelings than I had dreamed.

  I held her, I loved the narrow shoulders, the small-boned frailness of her, the softness of her breasts against me. I was kissing her eyes, her cheeks, but she cried in the panic of the sensation, her legs couldn’t find their place, she was like a swimmer kicking out or like someone trying to shinny up a pole.

  I wanted her to know the sudden certainty declaring in me like God. I was where I belonged! I remembered this!

  But she didn’t seem to be aware of how I felt, there was this distracted spirit of her, her head shook from side to side with bursts of voice, like sobs, as if someone was mourned.

  Our lovemaking was like song or like speech. “Don’t you see,” I asked again and again, “don’t you understand?” And she shook her head from side to side in her distraction. I couldn’t overcome this. I became insistent, I felt my time running out, I felt I had to break into her recognition. It’s you, I wanted her to say, and she wouldn’t she wouldn’t say the words.

  And then the tenderness was gone and I was pounding the breath from her, beating ugly grunts of sound from her, wanting her to form words but hearing savage stupid gusts of voiceless air coming from her.

  In my moment of stunned paralytic grief I groan I go off bucking I think I hear her laugh.

  For several days we made our life sleeping till mid-morning and getting on the road and driving again till the sun went down and we could find a bed. We drove through boarded-up towns, we ate blue-plate specials and we slept in rooming houses with linoleum on the floor and outhouses in back or in small motor-court cabins with the sound all night of the trucks rolling past. Night and morning we made love it was what we did our occupation our exercise. But always with great suspense in my mind. I never knew if it would happen again. I didn’t have the feeling anything was established in her. She fucked in a kind of lonely self-intensification. She slept without touching me, she slept with no need to touch or hold me, she went off to sleep and it was as if I weren’t there.

  I would think about this lying in the dark while she slept. I was there for her, I was what she assumed, and I was willing to be that, to be the assumption she didn’t even know she was making. And then one day she’d discover that she loved me.

  Once in a while, usually in the numb exhaustion of daybreak, I’d look into her face and see an aspect there of the acknowledgment I wanted in the gold-washed green eyes. There would be humor in them. The lips slightly swollen and open, the small warm puff of breath. She’d giggle to see neither of us was dead and she’d give me a cracklipped kiss a soft dry kiss with the hot pulp of her lip against mine.
br />   She liked to be inside her appetites and her feelings. Whatever they were. One day in a rainstorm I skidded off the road. I was frantically spinning the wheel, I couldn’t see through the rain, it had turned white, opaque, but Clara was laughing and shrieking like a kid on a carnival ride. We thudded into a ditch. Water softened the canvas top and began to leak through and we sat at a tilt as if in a diving plane, in clouds. I thought we might drown. Then we felt the car rise, somehow the water floated us free, and when the storm passed over, we gently drifted a half mile or so in the flood like some stately barge down a stream. She loved it, she loved every second of it, her fingers gripping my arm, the nails digging into my skin.

  Sometimes we went out at night walking some main street to a local movie. She liked to stop in a tavern and drink ten-cent beers, she liked the looks she got, the sexual alert that went off every time she walked into a bar or a diner. One time someone came over to the booth and started to talk to her as if I weren’t even there. It seemed to me unavoidable what I had to do. He was an amiable fellow with a foolish grin, but with the strength in him of belonging in this bar, of being known in this bar, this town, he looked down and saw my knife, the tip making an indentation in the blue shirt and the sprung gut. He was genuinely astonished, they don’t use knives in boondocks of the Midwest, he backed off with his palms up.

  She had turned pale. “What’s the idea, do you know what you’re doing?” She spoke in a soft urgent whisper leaning toward me over the table.

  “I do,” I said, “and if you don’t stand up and get your ass moving I’ll do the same to you.”

  Outside I grabbed her arm. She was in a cold rage but I had the feeling, too, that I had done right, that I had shown her something she wanted to see.

  “You know something?” she said as I hurried her along to our room. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

  I thought they were the first words of love I’d heard from her.

  In Dayton, Ohio, I saw in the rear-view mirror the unmistakable professional interest of a traffic cop as we drove away from his intersection.